Looking For That Feeling: Narrative Omissions in Jesus' Son by Jordan Mae Schroeder A thesis presented for the B.A. degree with Honors in The Department of English University of Michigan Spring 2012 © March 2012 Jordan Mae Schroeder Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere thanks to all who have guided and encouraged me throughout this process. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor Cody Walker for his encouragement and confidence in my project, especially when mine was waning. He kept me laughing while I wrote about a very dark collection of stories. I am grateful for Jennifer Wenzel’s support and feedback throughout this project. She was both an attentive honors advisor, and her insights led my thesis in so many wonderful directions. I would also like to thank the amazing Honors thesis cohort of 2012 and the Summer Honors Fellowship Cohort of 2011. These dedicated students provided an invaluable support system and have become my greatest friends. I would like to thank Professors Lucy Hartley, Jonathan Freedman, and John Whittier- Ferguson, who supported me in applying to the English Department’s Honors Program and carrying my intellectual momentum on to the graduate level. And lastly, I owe a special thanks to Eileen Pollack. In one short conversation she changed the direction of my project. Abstract This thesis examines how Denis Johnson, in his collection of short stories, Jesus’ Son (1990), creates an overall theme of salvation while presenting a series of stories devoid of it. In Jesus’ Son, Johnson paints a picture of a chaotic and possibly godless universe; life and death are observed with a deadpan tone, the imagery is seemingly senseless, and time is fluid. The result is the creation of humorous yet disturbing verbal, cosmic, and dramatic irony, which implies that the world is profoundly comic and tragic. The world within these stories lacks order, yet the narrator, Fuckhead, stumbles through it looking for acceptance and genuine human connection. Johnson’s narrative strategies within these stories and throughout the collection result in its unexpectedly moral conclusion. Johnson hands the reader a series of nightmares and says, essentially, “You deal with it.” At the end of the first story Fuckhead directly addresses the reader, “And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.” And what can the reader do with that? Chapter One describes how Johnson characterizes Fuckhead’s world as chaotic through drug use and memory distortion, enabling Fuckhead to avoid acknowledging the tragic nature of his world. Chapter Two analyzes narrative omission, briefly comparing Jesus’ Son to Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and demonstrating how violence and mortality are simultaneously present yet unaddressed. Chapter Three explores how holes in the narrative create irony, and how Johnson’s use of strangely poetic imagery and metaphors complement the stories’ irony. It is through irony, and more importantly through the humor that irony provides, that Johnson is able to present complex themes concerning mortality, salvation, and death without actually saying anything conclusive about them. Chapter Four and Five establish that the collection as a whole operates differently than the individual stories on a thematic level. The collection as a whole provides a comic arc that the individual stories, while possibly contributing to, ultimately lack. It is through the collection’s progress from chaos and ignorance to beauty and finally to acceptance that Denis Johnson creates a collection of short stories that forces the reader to do interpretive work long after the reading is over. Had Johnson’s collection not progressed from the tragic to the comic, the possibility of Fuckhead’s salvation at the end would be disingenuous if not entirely lost. CONTENTS Introduction ………………………………………………………………....... 1 Chapter One …………………………………………………………………… 5 Avoiding Tragedies Chapter Two …………………………………………………………………… 15 Holes in the Stories Chapter Three …………………………………………………………………… 23 Holes Filled with Irony Chapter Four …………………………………………………………………… 36 Creating Comedy Chapter Five ……………………………………………………………………. 42 Salvation and Conclusion Works Consulted ……………………………………………………………. 51 1 Introduction Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (1990) is a collection of short stories following the life of the narrator, Fuckhead, over an indeterminate number of years. Fuckhead is more screw up than criminal, with a history of drug addiction and alcoholism. Although Jesus’ Son has been lauded by critics as doing something profound, no one seems able to articulate what that is. I argue that what is profound and distinct about these stories has to do with Johnson’s narrative strategies, and more specifically, narrative omissions, because it is the holes in the narrative that lead the reader to multiple interpretations. I am asking how rhetorical devices present the theme of a fallen world in a way that is comic, grotesque, and ultimately haunting. How is tension created in these stories and how does the tension lead the reader to any sort of conclusion? This thesis examines how thematic complexities, including the problematic nature of the world, of knowledge, of time, and of the self, are constructed with striking stylistic precision in Jesus’ Son. The narrative strategies in Jesus’ Son can be defined as imagery, metaphor, symbolism, time, tone, humor, irony, and omission. Omissions or holes can be found in a lack of verbal communication between characters, an indifferent tone, a lack of imagery, gaps in time or action, and the use of different types of irony. How does creating spaces in this collection of stories, leaving certain symbols, emotions, and actions at odds with one another, move the reader; how is what is suppressed and omitted from a story paradoxically still there? How can I address the unknown or unheard? 2 A character’s attitudes or thoughts may remain unarticulated, just as tone, narration, and imagery may be minimal, but what is omitted is nevertheless present, even if the absence only serves to demonstrate the author or narrator’s inability to communicate. Omissions indicate a communicative struggle, and just by indicating a difficulty, omissions no longer become omissions. The very act of omission should make the reader ask, “Why has this been excluded?” Hence, unspoken thoughts and images are not omissions or silences in a text, but rather holes or apertures. Holes create the implication of tunnels and passages which have the potential to lead the reader to multiple meanings or conclusions as opposed to abandoning him in literary purgatory. Holes are not a new or unusual literary occurrence. So, what makes Denis Johnson’s use of this technique in Jesus’ Son different than Ernest Hemingway’s or Tim O’Brien’s use of narrative omission in In Our Time or The Things They Carried? This thesis briefly compares Jesus’ Son to Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried because narrative omissions in all three collections raise questions of consciousness, existence, and the nature of the world. These authors fill the holes in their stories with ironies that make the reader laugh, cry, or do both at the same time. They use omission to portray God as the ultimate ironist, creating a universe where there is no truth or where the truth exists but can never be found, or they make statements about meaning while suggesting the world is meaningless. I hate to use a term as vague as “truth,” but that is what these authors are trying to achieve, a basic understanding of why the world is the way it is; what sacrifice is or what salvation means. All three authors provide narrators who search for answers to abstract questions about what it means to be human, and the questions are never answered. O’Brien’s and Hemingway’s collections end with the idea that the characters can save their lives with a story. Of course, these collections never reveal any distinct truths, but they hint and end 3 with the possibility of them. It is as if Hemingway and O’Brien are telling the reader that if their collections kept going, if they had more time, they would tell the reader everything. Unlike, In Our Time or The Things They Carried, Jesus’ Son seems to end with an optimistic conclusion and the feeling that the world has worked itself out. If all three collections have narrative holes, why is Jesus’ Son the only collection to end with a feeling of conclusion? The question then becomes, how does Denis Johnson use narrative omission, and how does leaving things out become conclusive? Paradoxically, where there is a lack in one area there is overabundance elsewhere, just as when one sense fades other senses become stronger to compensate for its loss. For instance, if a character is too traumatized to express emotion, the author may compensate for the hole in the narrative with imagery. The imagery might be melancholic or horrific or ironic. It should show or make the reader feel what the character’s emotions would have told him. In The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter insists that “the best interests of a story are served when the subtext is as congested as possible. The emotions and meanings in the story go off in every possible direction and remain in the mind long after the story is over” (64). Baxter’s suggestion that an abundance of sensations is better than one direct message is not as radical as it may seem. If one were to follow Viktor Shklovsky’s logic, then the purpose of art is to “impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” Thus, the technique of art is “to make objects unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, [and] to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (Shklovsky 16).